INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSES

Stockholm Resilience Centre offers interdisciplinary courses on first (Undergraduate), second (Master's) and third (PhD) levels of University education. Want to know more about our courses? Click here!

POLICY and Practice

Our engagement in science-policy-practice activities has increased steadily over the years and range from high-level UN dialogues to local resilience assessments. Want to know more about our policy work? Click here!

In their final reply to Montoya et. al's criticism of the planetary boundaries framework, Rockström, Richardson and Steffen characterise the exchange with Montoya et al. as doubly frustrating because the criticism is factually wrong and because "there is more that unites us than divides us." Illustration: F. Pharand-Deschênes/Globaïa

As we have stated before, we find this destructive exchange with Montoya et al. doubly frustrating. Not only because it is factually wrong, but also because we are convinced that there is more that unites us than divides us. We are both scientific communities engaged in sustainability science for human wellbeing. Instead of throwing provocations in public, it would seem much more constructive to focus on sharing scientific evidence, concepts and methods and, through collegial exchange and collaborations, move the global sustainability science frontier forward.

It is very easy to sort out the only attempt at substantive critique in this final reply by Montoya et al., namely that we are accused of using multiple terms and concepts that are not defined properly. We would recommend them to read carefully the 2015 planetary boundaries science paper (Steffen et al., 2015), where we clarify definitions and the overall framework. In particular, Table 1 defines, for each planetary boundary, the Earth System process on which the boundary is based, the control variable(s), the planetary boundary itself (with the zone of uncertainty), and the current value of the control variable. All of these terms are carefully defined in the paper. This has been done in collaboration with leading scientists around the world, e.g., building on the biodiversity/biosphere integrity planetary boundaries advancements made by Mace et al. (2014), which led to the widening of the boundary to include both genetic and functional diversity, both clearly defined in Steffen et al. (2015).

Drawing on such collaborative efforts by leading scientists is how we can best advance the rapidly moving frontier on global sustainability science, with planetary boundaries as one scientific framework to help us understand and navigate the Anthropocene.